


We Could Be Immortals

by Kirmon64



Series: We Could Be Immortals [1]
Category: Chappie (2015)
Genre: (aka written as gen but can easily be read as shippy if that's your thing), Body Dysphoria, Found Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Robot Feels, Shippy Gen, who wants to live forever?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-30
Updated: 2015-06-30
Packaged: 2018-04-06 23:15:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4240344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kirmon64/pseuds/Kirmon64
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A week after he dies-but-doesn't, Deon realizes that he is functionally immortal. Bridge between certain end-scenes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Could Be Immortals

**Author's Note:**

> No idea why there's no fandom for this movie. I suppose I'll have to fill the fic gap myself~
> 
> Concrit very much appreciated!
> 
> Entirely inspired by Fall Out Boy's [Immortals](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBiQCZd8UII). (Yes, it's a Big Hero 6 song... but it fits Chappie so much better.)

"Come, Maker! Come quickly! We goin' back home!"

Deon almost doesn't follow him. He almost points out that his house is on the opposite end of Johannesburg.

Then he remembers that he's a robot and his dead body is sitting in Tetravaal's factory.

He follows. What else is he going to do?

 

* * *

 

He and Ninja don't get along. This doesn't change after Deon is made of metal. Their first argument (one of many) is on the very first day. Within the very first hour. It's about where they are going to stay. Ninja doesn't want to leave Power Park; Deon knows that the JMPD are going to look there first, once they get organized. Ninja may have enough weapons to supply a small army, and he and Chappie may be nigh-invulnerable, but they cannot fight the entire police force.

Chappie decides, in the end. He sides with Deon over 'Daddy', and that too prompts a fight. It's cut short when Chappie lifts Ninja by the hem of his shirt, motions as if to punch him, and yells in his face. He acquiesces quickly after that.

(Deon expects them to not talk for days. They make up instantly, albeit with curses hurled with what seems like mutual hatred. He promptly gives up on understanding their relationship.)

 

* * *

 

They put their plan in motion that night. Deon has been robotic for six hours. It's getting easier, even if he still trips over his own feet every now and again.

Ninja stays at the power plant. He burns everything. Deon doesn't pry. He may be Chappie's maker, but he's not part of that family. It's not his place to ask questions.

Deon and Chappie head out into Joburg itself. They have errands to run.

Chappie escorts him to his house; Deon hasn't a clue where it is, in all honesty. Things look different at night, through robotic eyes, travelling only through alleys and under the cover of shadows. Chappie may have GPS, but his own body is lacking it and he's pretty sure he wouldn't be able to work it anyway.

He goes in through his bedroom window. By breaking it. Dexter makes unhappy noises as Deon hauls himself in, but he was never programmed to react to the possibility of burglary so all he does is begin to clean up the glass.

He reacts to Deon as though he's an inanimate object. Deon supposes he should be grateful. At least it would be easier to leave without feeling like he'd left his other creations behind.

His computer chair creaks ominously under his weight when he sits in it, but it holds. He awakens his setup from sleep mode. The schematics for Chappie's consciousness are still the windows at the forefront of each monitor.

Less than a week ago he'd been struggling with getting Chappie's consciousness working. Now he's a robot because his own robot devised a program to transfer consciousnesses. In two days. In a ghetto with nothing but a five-year old laptop and a dozen networked PS4s.

Deon shivers. The clattering apparently sounds like something breaking to Dexter, who promptly putters in to find the source of the sound.

Concentrate. Concentrate, Deon.

"Red Bull!"

Dexter may not know who he is and probably doesn't recognize his voice either, but he recognizes the command. The Red Bull is promptly fetched, and Deon sets to work.

He needs to wipe everything. Everything. Most of it he deletes. He digs out his old thumb drives and saves the rest of it. Chappie's uncompiled proto-consciousness he keeps, after some deliberation. It seems... wrong to delete it.

He checks his banking information, next. He doesn't know what happens to the funds of the dead if they don't have a will, or how long it'll take for said things to happen. But they are going to need the money, and it's going to have to be in physical form. Unfortunately his debit card had been in his wallet, which had been in his pants, which were by now certainly impossible to get to. After some deliberation he transfers as much as he dares to his Paypal accounts and decides they'll have to figure something out later.

For several minutes he simply sits and clicks through files. Photos, mostly. Colleagues, friends. Brother, parents. All people he'd never see again. Or if he did see them, it wouldn't be as Deon Wilson. Deon Wilson had died in the factory. There would be a funeral. Open-casket, most likely.

He wonders if he could attend his own funeral.

Then he crushes his can and formats all his drives. Then for good measure he takes them out and stomps them into dust. It feels both freeing and like a nail in his own coffin.

"Oh no!" Dexter says, and moves to clean up this new mess. Deon catches him; Dexter doesn't protest, but then he wasn't programmed to.

"I'm sorry, Dexter," Deon says softly, and shuts him off for the first time in a year. "You were great. Thank you."

He finds a bag, and stuffs it full of whatever he can think to bring. Maintenance supplies for himself and Chappie, food and everything in his medicine cabinet for Ninja. He takes one last look at his old life, and then leaves through the front door. It's not safe to hang around his former home for long.

 

* * *

 

Chappie finds him before long. Not that he'd wandered far.

Slung over one shoulder is a backpack with three Scout batteries inside. Deon's not sure whether or not to be surprised at how quickly Chappie'd found them. Tetravaal and the police had their plate full, but surely the collection of the downed Scouts would be high priority?

Chappie picks up on his mood immediately. He doesn't ask - had he learned to not pry, or did he understand? Deon supposes it doesn't really matter. Chappie puts an arm around his shoulders, first, and then he turns it into a full hug. It's awkward, thanks to their respective bags full of stuff. Their bodies don't fit together well either. No give, too much chest, too many small pieces that catch.

Deon cries anyway. Or he would if he had tear ducts to speak of.

Chappie holds him until he stops trembling, which according to his system clock is all of two minutes and fifteen seconds. The instinct is there to sniff, and wipe his eyes. He resists it. It's hard enough remembering that he doesn't have to push his glasses up anymore, he doesn't need any other tics.

Then again, he thinks as Chappie wipes his nonexistent nose, it's not like it would stand out.

Chappie doesn't say anything, but he touches his shoulder and does his own version of a smile. Deon smiles back. He's not as expressive as Chappie, but some of the movements are hardcoded in and Chappie seems to understand anyway.

"Come on, Maker," Chappie says. "I got more batteries."

He takes Deon's hand, and together they run through the quiet streets of Johannesburg.

 

* * *

 

They return to Power Park, after they pick up all of Chappie's battery stashes. There's fourteen, total, but one's got a bullet embedded in it and the other's casing is badly cracked so the count is an even dozen in the end. It's still enough to last the two of them years, maybe decades. Each charge could last two weeks if the batteries were well-maintained, and their ability to be recharged meant that they were infinitely reusable. Their efficiency would dwindle of course, but by then the Scouts might be in production again and they could scavenge more. Worst-case scenario, they could figure out how to run off some other power source.

Ninja ignores Deon when he steps inside, but this means that they're not arguing so Deon doesn't exactly mind. He does, however, head immediately for Chappie, brandishing a thumb drive with something written on it in white-out that Deon can't quite make out.

Chappie's antennae immediately perk up. He knows. He grabs Ninja's hand, enclosing the thumb drive within.

"I can bring her back, Daddy. You gotta keep her safe for me til then. Please?"

Ninja nods, mutely. Deon can see the unshed tears in the man's eyes, and he busies himself with checking over their supplies again. He doesn't look up again until both of them have left.

Yolandi, Deon thinks. A backup of Yolandi? Chappie had to have tested his code on _someone_ , and she was the most likely candidate.

...She was going to be put in a body at some point. Not today, probably not this week, maybe not even this month. But one day. The batteries wouldn't last as long with three bodies to power, but he supposes they'll deal with that if and when it becomes an issue. He's hardly going to deny Chappie the opportunity to get his Mommy back.

 

* * *

 

Ninja sleeps in the early hours of the morning. He's been awake for thirty-six hours, and in that span of time not only has he ran himself ragged, he's been shot in the leg and lost the two people he cared about most. Deon certainly can't blame the man for being too exhausted to continue.

He and Chappie, on the other hand, don't sleep. They need to wait for Ninja to wake up, because he's the only human left, the only one able to interact with other people. The only one who actually knows where the hell any of of them can hide until everything calms down.

(Deon resigns himself to forever living in poverty. Not like he could show his face in public anyway.)

They find a white rat wandering the upper level at eight in the morning. Yolandi's pet, as it turns out. Deon's not really afraid of rats, but nor does he particularly want anything to do with it. Chappie, on the other hand, immediately picks it up and coos at it.

The rat's name is Tek. It seems to genuinely enjoy Chappie's company, chasing and nipping his fingers when prompted and calmly taking food when it's offered. It eventually falls asleep in the crook between Chappie's shoulder and neck. It must know he's not human, and yet it trusts him just the same anyway. Deon recalls some hazy memory of someone telling him that animals could read your energy, could read your intentions - maybe it simply read Chappie as some kind of strange metal human?

If only actual humans could be like that, Deon thinks as Tek continues to nap as though he's in the safest place in the world. If only.

 

* * *

 

"Tetravaal will find us through you," Deon tells Chappie. "Through your GPS. That's how they tracked you before, and that's how they'll do it now."

Chappie pets Tek, looking pensive. He's not stupid; he knows what Deon is implying. The GPS needs to be disabled - but the software is locked down tight. Maybe they could disable the autotracking... with the Guard Key, and diagnostic software, and an actual workstation, and enough time. All things they don't have and are not likely to have anytime soon.

"You need to take it out," Chappie replies. It's not a question.

They set up in what's left of the kitchen. The rat comes with them; Chappie puts it on the table and it seems content to nose around the broken dishes for morsels of food. He sits, and Deon stands behind him.

There's enough tools laying around for Deon to get the back of Chappie's head open with minimum fuss. Chappie doesn't move, doesn't react, and it's a minute before Deon realizes that he's _too_ still. He's afraid. Terrified. He doesn't know what happened, exactly, but he knows that at some point the CPU of Chappie's old body had to be duct taped back in place....

He puts his hand on Chappie's shoulder. Chappie covers it with his own, and grips tight.

"Please be careful, Maker."

Deon reassures him that he will, that he knows what he's doing, that this shouldn't be too difficult or take too long. In reality he feels like he would be hyperventilating if he still breathed. Chappie's electronic brain is arrayed before him, the entire consciousness of this amazing being fitting onto the CPU wafers crammed into his titanium skull. If he messes up, if he so much as touches the wrong thing...

Brain surgery, Deon thinks, and fights down the urge to laugh or cry or both. This was not what he had signed up for. At all.

He does it anyway.

He succeeds.

 

* * *

 

They bury Yolandi and Amerika after Ninja wakes up. Deon and Chappie do most of the work, due to Ninja's injury. It's an experience that Deon does not ever, _ever_  want to repeat. Yolandi's body isn't difficult to move, but when they try to figure out what to do with Amerika...

Chappie mostly deals with that, thank god. Deon ineffectually dry-heaves for several minutes after trying to help. Fuck Vincent and his megalomania. Fuck him up the ass with a rusty cleaver.

(Ninja voices his thoughts in much more colorful terms than Deon could have ever imagined. For once they are in total agreement.)

They dig separate graves for the two of them, even if it's double the work for little gain. Chappie and Ninja seem to want it that way, and Deon is not going to complain. He's acutely aware of his status as _outsider_ , and he's not about to make things more strained than they already are.

The funeral itself is... quiet. Ninja doesn't say a thing the entire time, but again he looks like he's only keeping himself from crying through sheer force of will. Deon feels like a trespasser. He shouldn't be here, this wasn't his family....

Ninja's still carrying the thumb drive. Deon wonders if he slept with it.

 

* * *

 

They load the car up and head out at noon. Deon has been a robot for sixteen hours. It feels like there's something crawling at the edges of his vision. Like static fuzz. He ignores it for now. What diagnostics he can figure out how to use say that everything's normal, and he's not going to bother Chappie about it quite yet.

Ninja drives. Not that there was any possibility of it going any other way. Some of the bags go up front, in the passenger seat. He and Chappie, and all their supplies, are in the back, covered by a tarp. The car's already got a couple bullet holes in the doors, nobody needs to catch a glimpse of a pair of runaway robots in the back seat and complicate things more.

The downside of this is that Deon has no idea where they are or where they're going or what's going on outside the vehicle. Without his GPS, neither does Chappie.

Chappie doesn't like the dark. To be honest, Deon's not fond of it either. Not the dark itself per se, but the oppressive weight of the tarp and the knowledge that his life is completely in Ninja's hands. It's only Chappie's presence that keeps him calm. Because Ninja, whatever else he was, had developed a genuine fondness for Chappie. If he gave one of them away, he gave both of them away. And without Chappie, he'd never get his girl back.

Chappie's glowing screen-eyes watch him from the seat above. He'd insisted on taking the seat and having Deon lay on the floor. In case something happened, he'd said, so he could get up and react faster. The earlier reluctance to fight, to hurt, all that was gone. It was replaced by a calm determination that both reassured and frightened Deon. His creation was well on his way to being all grown up. Here, in the dark, his worries were magnified. Nothing could stop Chappie now, if he decided that humanity wasn't worth the effort. All he could do was pray that whatever morals he and Yolandi had managed to instill would hold true.

"You scared, Maker?" Chappie whispers.

Deon thinks about not replying. But Chappie had been lied to enough over his short life. And he needed to be taught that sometimes, it was okay to be scared. "Yes," he whispers back, and resists the urge to look away. Of you, some traitorous part of his mind whispers.

Chappie shifts on the seat, and shyly takes Deon's hand.

"I'm scared too," he admits. "But we got each other, right?"

Deon smiles. It's as much to reassure Chappie as it is to reassure himself. "Right."

"Forever?"

"Forever. I promise."

 

* * *

 

They stay in Soweto. Not that Deon expected anything else.

The house is tiny. If it can even be called a house. Four cramped rooms of equal size did not a house make. There's roaches in the bedroom. A hole in the roof that's going to leak like a motherfucker when it rains. Something that looks like dried blood is smeared all over one of the walls in the kitchen. At least it's got electricity and running water.

Ninja doesn't tell them how he got ahold of this place. Deon decides he's not going to ask.

 

* * *

 

Things fall into a sort of routine after that. Ninja is still the only one that ever goes more than a few meters from the house. Chappie's... uneasy without his GPS, Deon thinks. Deon is just plain nervous. Staying inside isn't doing either of them any favours, mind; Deon swears he can feel the cabin fever physically creeping upon him as the hours roll by. Chappie seems just as restless, developing fidgety tics and a mild temper as time goes on. He's still just a kid. He needs to get out, needs stimulation.

The fuzzy vision gets worse over time. On day two he finally tells Chappie about it. At least the troubleshooting gives them something to do, and it has a practical benefit as well: Chappie starts trying to teach him how his body works. Deon knows the technical info, of course, but _living_ in the body is worlds different from simply reading about it.

The command line interface is at once both amazing and Deon's worst nightmare come to life. They sit on the kitchen floor when Ninja's out hunting down supplies. Crosslegged, face-to-face, with Chappie holding both his hands. Physical touch keeps him grounded, keeps him focused, and it also keeps Chappie aware of Deon's mental state when he inevitably goes non-verbal from information overload.

It's like a sixth sense. Like reaching into your own head and pressing buttons to manipulate your heartbeats. It's not painful - nothing's painful, he can't sense pain anymore - but it's disorienting, and if his control slips up things go wrong. Once he'd shut down his motor control, and another instance had him a few words away from formatting his CPU. It's exhausting and stressful, and Deon finds himself craving a strong tea more and more after every attempt.

Chappie never leaves his side, even when he's snappish and irritable. Deon is infinitely grateful.

 

* * *

 

Ninja returns, and this time he has a laptop. Chappie immediately pounces on it. He'd brought up Yolandi's consciousness many times in the past two days, and Deon knows he'd been beyond ready to work on getting his Mommy back.

Deon tries his best to help, if only for something to do. He's useful in the early stages, when Chappie's asking him questions about the Scout firmware and Tetravaal's security, but things quickly progress beyond his expertise when Chappie begins the process of recreating the consciousness transferral program. Deon simply sits back and watches, and lets Chappie do as he pleases.

It doesn't take Chappie long to rewrite the transfer program. Robotic memory recall, Deon supposes, even if Chappie's mind was structured differently from traditional CPU architecture.

There's more to it than that, though. Chappie sees what Deon struggles with on a daily basis, and he... fixes it. The transfer program's done in a few hours, but the support structure for Yolandi's consciousness takes days. Deon is more involved with this process, because at least he has firsthand experience.

Chappie writes his Mommy instincts: what parts of herself she will need to protect, what parts can take what kind of punishment. How to walk, how to run, how hard she can push herself. How her cooling system works: the flusher, the mister, the self-sealing valves. He gives her a proper command line GUI, so she can avoid Deon's perpetual struggles with it. Deon is jealous, though he tries very hard not to be.

"We'll make you one too, Deon," Chappie reassures him, and squeezes his hand. "I promise."

 

* * *

 

A week after he dies-but-doesn't, Deon realizes that he is functionally immortal.

He'd known before. God, how could he not? But it's only a week later that it truly sinks in.

He cannot die. Not unless it was by his own hand, or with outside intervention. Two weeks ago he'd been subsisting off of Red Bull and terrible takeout. A week ago he'd been bleeding out onto the floor of his company van. Now he's made of a titanium alloy with coolant for blood and silicon wafers for brains.

He's never been more terrified in his life.

 

* * *

 

On the eighth day, Deon begins to feel phantom pains.

There's the literal pain. In his abdomen, through his stomach and out his back. Where he'd been shot. It's not nearly as bad as that, thank god. It's more of a twinge. An itch, like a peeling scab.

Then there is the hunger, and the thirst. Both are fleeting - the scratch of a dry throat, a contraction of his nonexistent stomach. They're gone as quickly as they come, which is nearly as disorienting as it is annoying.

Then, Deon realizes what the permanent fuzziness in his vision is. He's tired. _Exhausted_. His mind demands a sleep that his body can no longer give.

Things... start to deteriorate after that.

Chappie notices right away. Well, how could he not? They'd spent almost every moment together for the past week, he was bound to notice an abrupt personality change in his Maker.

Deon curls up on the ratty old couch. Chappie kneels beside him, and runs gentle fingers over his face. Like a mother comforting a child, Deon thinks. He's suddenly beyond grateful for Yolandi's existence.

"I need to sleep, Chappie."

Chappie cups Deon's face in his hand. "But Maker... you a robot. You can't sleep."

"I know. But I have to try. I can't... I can't deal with this anymore."

Chappie's expression shifts to something he can't identify. Worry, maybe, or fear. Then he nods. "Okay. I'll stay with you. Help you sleep, ja?"

Deon nods. Chappie gets the laptop, settles down, and several moments later he starts to talk. A story, Deon realizes after the first few sentences. He's reading me a bedtime story.

He pulls the shirt draped over the couch's arm onto his face. It's not the same as closing his eyes, but it's better than nothing and he doesn't trust himself to try and disable his vision library right now.

Sleep doesn't come naturally, not that he'd expected it to. Still... the simple act of lying in a prone position seems to help. No running, no worrying, no arguing with Ninja. Just him and Chappie, the way he had dreamed it might be. All it had taken was his death and a subsequent mental breakdown, apparently.

Chappie takes hold of Deon's hand at some point. Everything feels warm and indistinct. Peaceful. Chappie runs his thumb across Deon's knuckles, and he lets himself... drift.

 

* * *

 

He's standing downtown. His glasses are missing.

People are screaming, running. Something in the sky is chasing them. A man is laughing, pressing a gun to his jaw. He needs to escape - needs to find the others.

He needs to find Chappie.

He runs, but everywhere people are dying. He can't see. There are deactivated Scouts everywhere. Some of them are covered in graffiti. He's forced to step on them as he runs; their limbs crunch like bone under his shoes.

The man laughs and laughs and laughs. Suddenly the man is standing at the hideout, the pistol shoved up underneath Chappie's chin. Chappie is crying, begging the man to let him go.

Deon runs. He has to stop the man. He has to stop the man! The man laughs and laughs, and raises his pistol - suddenly there is blood on Deon's hands, blood on the ground, blood everywhere.

Chappie screams.

"Maker!"

Deon feels someone holding his hand. It's metal. Is it Chappie? But the man is holding Chappie, putting the gun to his head.

He pulls the trigger -

_"Maker!"_

\- And Deon tumbles to the floor.

There's shouting. Chappie's voice, and more distantly, a human's. Ninja. Swearing, asking what's going on, Chappie yelling something back about everything being fine, please don't come in Daddy, he has it under control.

He still can't see. Why can't he see? Where are his glasses?

"Maker," Chappie says, from somewhere nearby. His hand touches Deon's shoulder. "Deon. It's okay. You safe, I got you."

But there was a man, Deon wants to say. And then he remembers where he is. What he is. Vincent was either dead or in intensive care. Certainly he wasn't going to be threatening either of them anytime soon, if ever.

"There's no bad men here," Chappie continues. His hand leaves Deon's shoulder, and he has a panicked urge to grab it back. But then both of Chappie's hands rest on his head, and slowly begin to unwind the shirt tangled in his antennae. "Just me and Daddy. I got you, Maker. I won't let anyone hurt you. It's okay."

Chappie's voice is not exactly what Deon would term 'soothing'; the electronic timbre and thuggish inflection make it more grating than anything. But it's familiar and it's calm, and Deon finds himself slowly relaxing. His servos groan as he lets them release, one by one.

Chappie finally gets the shirt off. Sunlight trickles in through the single dirty window, and Chappie smiles at him. He takes both of Deon's hands in his own, and Deon has the sudden hysterical urge to cry. Fuck.

"I don't know if I can do this," he whispers.

Chappie's smile turns to a confused frown. Deon takes his hands back, and buries his head in them. Chappie puts his hands on Deon's knees instead, and waits.

"Maker?"

"This. All of this. Living like this. In this place. With you and Ninja. I - I can't do this. I can't be a robot. I can't live forever."

He can hear Chappie's expression shift, but with his head in his hands he can't see a thing. Maybe that's for the best.

Humans weren't meant to live like this. No thirst, no hunger. Unable to sleep, slowly being driven insane by the lack of it. No pain, no pleasure, no sickness, no death. Immortality. True immortality, a real-life philosopher's stone.

There is a long silence in which neither of them move.

"Do you hate me, Maker?" Chappie asks. There's a tremble to his voice that Deon's never heard before.

Deon doesn't reply.

After a long while, Chappie gets up and leaves.

 

* * *

 

There's a tree outside their shack. Deon's sat under it, once, at four in the morning when no one was around. He's a fucking neon orange beacon in the dark, and he's always paranoid that one of their neighbors is going to rat them out if he's seen.

For the first time, he goes outside during the day.

It's high noon during the hottest days of the summer, and anyone that's not at work is staying inside to keep cool. If there's one thing he doesn't miss about being human, it's the sweating. He still can't stay out in the sun for too long or he'll overheat, but at least he's not sweating buckets.

He finds Chappie sitting under the tree. He looks away when Deon approaches, and he's uncomfortably reminded of Chappie's third day of life, when Deon had walked in on him carting around stolen PS4s.

"Chappie?"

He sits down on the dusty ground beside his creation. Who still won't look at him. He's fucked up. He's fucked up _bad_.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean..." he trails off, realizing he has no clue what he's going to say, and reaches for Chappie's hand instead.

Chappie lets him take it, and finally turns to face him. His expression is completely unreadable. When he speaks, the tremble's gone, but it's been replaced with something like despair. "No. You didn't do anything. I - I didn't think I... shit." He doesn't let go of Deon's hand, but he does rub his face with his free one. "It's okay that you hate me. I fucked up big time."

Deon desperately tries to figure out how to proceed. "Chappie," he eventually says, and shuffles a little closer til their shoulders touch. "I don't hate you. I just... I was disoriented, and frustrated. I'm very glad to be alive, trust me. And... and I think I slept. Or close enough to it. So... that helped. A lot, actually. I didn't mean anything that I said."

Chappie looks at him again, but it's not the kind of look Deon had hoped for. He looks... defeated. And just a little bit suspicious. So Deon hurries on, before Chappie can say anything.

"Do you remember when we were in the car? Under the tarp?" Chappie nods, so he barrels onwards. "And I promised you that I'd be with you forever. You can't break a promise."

"Yes, you can," Chappie replies quietly, and in that moment Deon's heart breaks. Chappie's grown up. He's not a kid anymore. Not even a teenager. He's... cynical. He promised himself to try and raise Chappie to the best of his ability, and look where _that's_ gotten the both of them.

But he can't give up now. He has to fix this.

He scrambles to his knees, kneeling in front of Chappie. He takes Chappie's hand in both of his, and Chappie stares at him.

"Not this one," Deon replies, fiercely. "I'm not going anywhere. I promise you that, Chappie, and even if you never believe another promise in your life you have to believe this one." He quirks a smile. "I mean, I died for you, didn't I? You can't get much more committed than that."

It gets a small laugh out of Chappie, at least. It sounds like a weird cross between human laughter and a pneumatic hiss. Then he sits up, and envelops Deon in a tight hug.

"I'm glad I have you, Maker. Even if it's not forever. I'll make this better, I'll make you better. I'll make you the best motherfuckin' robot in the whole fuckin' world."

It's Deon's turn to laugh. Maybe he hadn't completely fucked up. "Isn't that you?"

Chappie's antennae perk forward, and he playfully shoves Deon. He can practically see the amusement dancing in his eyes.

"Ne, I'm the best gangsta. You can be best robot, Deon. Gotta share, right?"

Deon laughs and shoves Chappie back.

Everything is going to be okay.


End file.
